


But Somehow through the Storm

by Le Mot de Cambronne (GilraenDernhelm)



Series: Politics/Soul [1]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: AU, Angsty and depressing, Assassin's Creed: Unity, Exile, Historical slash, I have no idea what I'm doing, Lots of liberties taken, M/M, Saint Helena
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-05-01
Packaged: 2018-03-21 05:19:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3679320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GilraenDernhelm/pseuds/Le%20Mot%20de%20Cambronne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of gloomy, chronologically-challenged sketches in which Arno visits Napoleon on Saint Helena.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> And I was on the island, and you were there too  
> But somehow through the storm  
> I couldn’t get to you.

Going a million miles from nowhere takes planning. If you set off, and then change your mind, going back is so tedious that staying on in a place you hate often turns out to be less trouble than leaving.

And yet I do not know why I have come here.

The blockade of British ships around the island was unnoticeable enough to be inconsequential when I arrived today. The ships were bobbing thoughtfully on the waves, as unthreatening as though they were made of air, and I had felt infinitely more threatened by the possibility of seasickness than I had by the uniformed lickspittle charged with examining everybody’s papers as soon as they came ashore (there is no port). I amused myself, from a distance, in watching the identical way that he would treat each passenger in the line – look, stamp, pass – the same rule for everyone, even for the only other Frenchman apart from me, who might, for all the officer knew, have been carrying secret papers to deliver to _General_ Bonaparte to assist him in the causing of further apocalyptic European mischief.

The reason for the officer’s nonchalance only occurred to me later.

On Saint Helena, there is nowhere to escape to.


	2. Chapter 2

There were many things I felt unsure of as I left Jamestown on foot and began to walk up towards Longwood. Whether he’d be glad to see me. Whether I’d have the courage, when it came to it, to see him. Whether I’d recognise him at all. Whether he’d recognise…me, at all.

There was, however, one thing of which I _could_ be certain, even after all this time.

He hated it here.

I had known it from the moment that I had seen the island filling up the horizon, and then my vision, with its enormous, jagged crags of rock that towered down on ship and man alike. I knew it now, as I turned back and looked down on black rock beaches and uneven mountains that were draped, overlaid, blanketed with savage tropical vegetation. The island was a living fortress: a prison that breathed, yes, but that breathed like an animal rather than a human being, offering nothing but a sharp and cruel horizon of miles and miles of ocean that I knew could do nothing but leave him wondering, _sans cesse_ , what was on the other side of it.

Though I’m sure he’d known what was on the other side before he even arrived here. Perhaps I do know him just a little after all.


	3. Chapter 3

The contemplation of miles and miles of ocean, and the knowledge of its presence as I turned my back and kept walking, reminded me that I hadn’t seen him in years: not since Russia, when the gulf between us had become too wide, and each of us had declared in no uncertain terms that we had no desire to look upon the other’s face again. Or perhaps that’s an overly-polite way of putting it. I distinctly remember losing a few teeth in the encounter, and as for Bonaparte, well: one would think that he was utterly unfamiliar with the concept of knowing one’s enemy before engaging in battle with him. He fights like a strong man butchering a weak one no matter who his opponent is. If he is the same in war, it explains his every victory, and his every defeat.

I had been on some preposterously-boring mission that entailed waiting around the palace of the Viceroy of India until such time as my superiors made up their minds as to whether or not they wanted him dead, when the news had come that Napoleon had landed in France, with a thousand men and the intention of holidaying in Paris before the month was out. The news had made me laugh for the first time in years – if the man had changed, his audacity certainly hadn’t – and somehow, I had found myself abandoning my post and taking the first ship back to France.

I didn’t once think about what I would do when I got to Paris. I certainly couldn’t _join_ him, even if I had wanted to. Or perhaps my actions were motivated by the simple desire to be present, and in Europe, when the world ended.

But in the end, none of it mattered. I arrived in Paris on the day the news came from Waterloo.

Intelligent people were holed up in their houses. Bonapartists with the money to leave were leaving, and royalists were dancing in the streets. From the corner of my eye, I saw a girl with dark red hair survey the scene with proud distaste, and when I turned in her direction, animated by the meaningless hope that never leaves me, I felt my heart die once again in my chest.


	4. Chapter 4

When I returned to my rooms the morning after her death, I found Napoleon waiting for me. He was sitting in his shirtsleeves in a chair by the fireplace; his legs gathered beneath him and his nose buried in an ancient copy of the _Correspondance Littéraire._

‘May I ask what measures you had to resort to to get your hands on one of these?’ he enquired, not looking up; ‘I have heard that only kings and queens were permitted to subscribe, on account of its content being too seditious for public consumption.’

I passed straight through the room into my bedchamber and slammed the door shut, too tired, too numb, too empty to do so much as tell him to get out.

My clothes were covered in Elise’s blood. When I removed my coat, and then my shirt, the very surface of my skin was damp with it.  And yet the absence of her only became real when I looked down at my hands. Sweet-smelling, metal-tasting gloves of crimson leather and silk.

My hands began to shake. I took my shirt between my fingers and tore it to shreds, flinging the pieces into the fire; trying to ignore the way that it sounded like flesh tearing while Elise’s voice thundered about my brain.

 _I’m sorry_.

_I’m sorry._

_I’m sorry._

The smell of blood permeated everything. The most ordinary smell in the world, made hideous. My head began to spin with it; the corners of my sanity to fall away. And I realised that my skin was still tingling with bloodlust, with the desire to kill and not think.

When I looked up again, I found Napoleon standing in front of me. His eyes were half horror, half cool observation, grey, like the colour of storm clouds. He put his hand onto my bare shoulder. His skin was as soft as a girl’s.

I wanted to tear him in half.

‘ _Porca Madonna_ ,’ he said, ‘what has happened to you?’

 _What had happened to me._ I hardly knew. The only thing I _did_ know was that if I tried to explain it, I would lose my mind, or murder him where he stood.

I wanted to tell him to step back. _Leave. Run._

But there was a deathly calm in his demeanour that came from knowledge rather than ignorance, _he’s a military man, he knows what he is seeing_ , and it was that, more than anything else, that began to calm me.

‘I…I wonder…’ I muttered, my teeth gritting together; my words like sawdust in my mouth, ‘if you wouldn’t mind telling me what has happened to you...in your life.’

If he was surprised or suspicious, he didn’t show it. He rang down for hot water, ‘I prefer to avoid looking at blood-stained individuals when I’m not on campaign,’ he said, and first in my bedchamber, and then later, in front of the fire, he talked non-stop; the _Correspondance Littéraire_ still open on his lap.

He spoke about his life, as I had asked him to. He told me of his childhood in broken French; our shared language insufficient to describe the island he had been born on and driven from; the island and its landscape that were ingrained into his consciousness in a way that he could never translate. His face was a portraitist’s nightmare: too many expressions, too many different people crammed into one individual; and all the time he would disappear, and the world would turn white; finding itself again in the sight of Elise lying dead, her eyes already closed for me, because I had not even been able to do that much for her.

Each time this happened, he would bring me back. Sometimes he would cough. Other times he would poke my knee painfully with his index finger, and smile gleefully each time I winced, and glared at him.

By the time night fell, I was exhausted. If he was too, he didn’t show it. We sat in opposite chairs with our elbows on our knees, as though reading some invisible book that only we could see.

‘Haven’t you had… other things to do today?’ I asked.

‘I was meant to be in Marseille today, so it’s of little matter,’ he replied.

‘Doesn’t the army throw you out for that sort of thing?’ I sighed, smiling weakly.

‘You can’t throw an officer out without consulting his brigadier,’ Napoleon told me, smiling back, ‘and mine will refuse.’

‘Why? Are you irreplaceable?’

‘Only to his wife.’

He left soon afterwards; shrugging into his uniform and groaning theatrically about the weight of it. Nevertheless, he buttoned it up to the neck, and stood facing me as I showed him out.

‘The world will no longer feel like the world,’ Napoleon softly told me, ‘at times, it will feel upside down. Other times that it has shifted ninety degrees, and everything is in a permanent state of falling. At these times, remember the ground beneath your feet. Feel it there. Fix your mind upon it. And you will remember that it is you that has changed, not everything.’

‘Everything _has_ changed,’ I muttered, my voice empty both of emotion and reason, ‘ _not_ just me, just…everything.’

I expected him to laugh, or at the very least to scoff. Instead, he smiled at me sadly, his expression indescribably soft and melancholy, and once he had embraced me (and mercifully neglected to give me a pat on the back), his fingers touched my face, and his lips slowly touched mine.

The kiss was brief. Italianate. To this day, I do not know that he meant anything by it. I do know that my lips were still moulding to his as he began to pull away, that he then leaned into me as I captured his bottom lip with both of mine, and that when our eyes met afterwards, his hand still touching my cheek, he had no more idea of what had just happened than I did.


	5. Chapter 5

The heat of the day was inhuman, and before long I had torn off my hood, loosened my collar, and sincerely contemplated leaving my coat on the side of the road while dread and anticipation poured off me like the sweat that drenched my clothes.

I remembered the rumours that I had heard, and the stories that I had read; the British press keen on humiliation, the French press keen on the business of forgetting: how Bonaparte lived his life on this boiling speck of land as though he were still an Emperor; dining off Imperial silverware; drawing up plans for battles still to fight; living on memory; living by court etiquette; Montholon and Bertrand in full dress uniform despite the heat.

_How do they do it?_

_And why does he let them?_

I remembered an evening, years ago, when a similar heat had descended on Paris. It was March, and the entire city, unprepared for anything but frost and freezing mud, had stood with doors and windows open to the heat, hoping for rain, or at least for a breeze.

I was alone at Café de la Régence, watching the chess. Napoleon wasn’t there, though before tonight, he always had been, and I found myself paying a heroic lack of attention to the empty seat looming out of the sweaty half-darkness next to me, and trying not to think about the last time I had seen him: the sound of his voice as we had lain on our backs in bed; his fingertips as they had traced the veins of my hand and lingered almost lovingly at the scar on my wrist.

‘Is she rich?’ I had asked him, when he had told me of his intention to marry the _ci-devant_ vicomtesse de Beauharnais.

‘Yes,’ Napoleon had replied; his almost-emaciated ribs like half-healed scars in the candlelight, ‘she is an aristocrat and a _martiniquaise_ , though most of her money seems to come from the latter.’

I chuckled.

‘Well played, my friend.’

‘Yes, indeed. The opportuneness of it is almost providential. Though she has been inconsiderate enough to make me fall in love with her as well.’

‘ _You’re in love with her_?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then what are you doing here, fucking me?’

He had turned onto his side to face me; his grey eyes like mist that could sear and kill, and he kissed, once, the soft skin at the base of my throat; the ghosts of his teeth leaving imprints on my skin; his tongue laving over them as his hips began to roll slowly against mine. I bit stubbornly on my bottom lip and willed myself not to move or make a sound, more out of spite than anything else. Then those infernal hands of his began to softly stroke my sides, my thighs, my cock; my lips let out a stifled moan, and before I could do so much as struggle, he had pinned me down, and I had let him; his cock pressed hard and hot against mine.

‘Answer the question, Bonaparte,’ I had muttered through gritted teeth, my voice flushed red with hunger.

‘You have a deep, repressed kind of violence about you,’ Napoleon had murmured in reply; trembling with something that I deluded myself was fear; ‘it enthrals me.’

I had gazed momentarily at my sword as it lay harmless on a chair and had seriously considered cutting his throat with it as the fingers of both his hands threaded through mine and my legs wrapped quickly and tightly around his waist, pulling him as close to me as nature allowed.

I gazed at my sword now – at Café de la Régence, watching the chess – to remind myself that I still _could_ cut his throat, if I wanted to.

I gazed down at the hilt, which so many times had seemed to be a part of my hand. And in that moment, the weapon seemed like nothing more than an artfully-crafted piece of metal: a thing of death, not life.

Then I looked up again, and the _propriétaire_ of the throat that I so keenly wanted to slit was pushing his way through the crowd of chess enthusiasts, looking intensely serious and more than a little annoyed.

He reached my side. He spoke in a manner reminiscent enough of Georges-Jacques Danton to make me roll my eyes.

‘ _Fait-moi l’honneur de profiter de ma voiture, citoyen_ ,’ he said.

‘I cannot; I have a bet on someone,’ I stiffly told him.

Napoleon cocked an amused eyebrow at me; his mood apparently forgotten.

‘Who?’ he enquired.

‘Man in the green coat,’ I replied.

Napoleon turned to examine the man at the table at the end of the room. He watched him for a few moments before turning back towards me.

‘Then may I suggest we leave,’ Napoleon said, ‘for he is about to lose.’


	6. Chapter 6

The man in the green coat swore violently, the carriage door clicked shut, and Napoleon and I were a street away from my creditors before any of them thought to collect.

I looked at him. He was wearing new clothes. I thought to myself that his old single-uniform wardrobe became him better.

We drove for some time in silence; his fingers toying with the gold thread on his sleeve in the same way that a godlier man might touch a rosary. I wondered if he believed in God.

_He believes in himself, and that is enough for him._

‘Joséphine was delighted with the bolt of white silk that you sent,’ Napoleon observed.

I made a point of not asking how he knew that the gift had been from me, and shrugged.

‘I do recall her being partial to white silk,’ I said, ‘heard it one night at Madame Tallien’s.’

Napoleon laughed.

‘You surprise me,’ he smiled, in a damnable way that was both warm and ironic, ‘I would have imagined such gatherings to be beneath your dignity.’

‘Beneath my attention span,’ I corrected, ‘and in any case, I was there to work.’

‘Strange,’ he observed, cocking an eyebrow at me, ‘I have attended consistently since my arrival in Paris, and the building and its occupants still seemed to be standing on all of those occasions.’

‘I take it you weren’t paying attention to the servants,’ I suggested.

‘Of course I pay attention to the servants!’ he exclaimed with indignation, ‘often they are more interesting than the guests.’

I did not reply. The target that night had been both young and female, and killing her had certainly not been my finest hour.

‘Won’t your delightful fiancée be wondering where you are?’ I ventured.

‘Most likely,’ Napoleon replied, unperturbed, ‘but I have neglected to tell her.’

‘A typical husband, then.’

‘It ceases, after tomorrow.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘What do you mean?’

I snorted at his obtuseness, convinced of its falsity.

‘You told me last week that our…association had reached its conclusion,’ I said, ‘and yet here you are again. Are you no longer concerned that someone might catch you and me engaged in our debauched _galanterie_?’

‘No’ Napoleon replied, ‘but I’m _bored_.’

‘Well,’ I grunted, ‘don’t worry. Italy should take care of that.’

He laughed warmly; his eyes wrinkling at the corners.

‘You’re right about that, my friend,’ he said, ‘I held a nice little review of some of the officers today, and fifteen of them had neglected to button their uniforms up to the top.’

‘Well,’ I mocked, ‘ _buttoned-up uniforms_ should make the enemy shake in their boots.’

Bonaparte gave me the satisfaction of seeing him glare at me in annoyance.

‘At least the enemy _possesses_ boots in which to shake,’ Napoleon growled.

‘Is that yet another unsubtle hint?’ I sighed.

‘On the contrary; I am the subtlest of men,’ Napoleon answered.

‘I’m not joining up, Bonaparte,’ I declared.

‘Whyever not?’ he demanded, ‘you can’t still be angry with me.’

I wanted to bash his head into the window.

‘We have had this discussion a thousand times before,’ I told him, ‘I cannot join any profession that entails the following of orders.’

‘True,’ Napoleon acknowledged, ‘but you’d only have to take orders from me.’

‘I’m incapable of taking orders from you!’

‘You surprise me. You’ve always been most obliging in the past.’

I didn’t bother protesting that particular assertion, however true it was, and I sat back in my seat and smirked at him.

He folded his hands neatly in his lap and changed the subject, and I could see that he hadn’t anticipated my reaction.

_So much the better. He is wrong to presume that he knows me._

‘This command will be the making of me,’ Napoleon quietly declared, staring regally out of the window in a way that anybody else might have found impressive, ‘and in the years to come, it will be vitally important that I surround myself with people who possess more than half a brain.’

‘You speak as though the world were already yours,’ I replied.

He shrugged.

‘Someday it will be. I have already tried to become master of Corsica twice…or was it three times? In any case, I failed. Conquering the world will be child’s play in comparison.’

I stared at him for two seconds, then began to laugh merrily, and I watched with great amusement as his eyes narrowed and his face began to redden in displeasure.

‘ _What_?’ he demanded.

‘Oh, just picturing you in a crown,’ I chuckled, ‘if you’re lucky, it might help you gain a good two inches.’

His expression softened. He smiled at me.

‘Why would I want that?’ he asked with mock gravity, ‘if I were any taller, there’d be no way of picking me out from the crowd. _Le petit corporel_ would become _l’invisible corporel_.’

‘I thought it was _le petit général_ now _,_ ’ I proposed, when in truth I knew nothing of the sort.

‘ _Le petit corporel_ denotes a certain affection on the part of the men,’ Napoleon explained, humouring me, ‘ _le petit général_ just sounds ridiculous.’

‘ _Corporel_ or _général,_ I’m not joining either of you.’

‘ _Au nom du ciel,_ Arno, WHY NOT?’

‘BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO.’

‘It’s absurd that a man of your abilities should be at the beck and call of a lot of doddering old fools who can find no better use for you than the assassination of servants at high-society _salons_. In the army, you would at least serve some purpose.’

‘And what purpose is that?’

‘Serving the interests of France.’

‘Of _France_?’

The carriage screeched to a halt like some God-given theatrical cue, his fist lashed out so quickly that it struck the side of my face before I could do so much as move, and when my hands belted out to snap his neck in response, my fingers touched his face instead, and the warmth that I felt there drew all thoughts of killing him from my mind.

I shoved him back into his seat. He let me. His lips were boiling as I sliced into them with mine; I felt his breath gasp into me, then his teeth, then his tongue – the taste of burgundy, the taste of solace; his hands buried in my hair, the strands clutched between his fingers; no space between us; no difference.

‘Damn you,’ Napoleon whispered against my lips; pulling me closer; not stopping; ‘damn you, damn you, damn you –’

‘Damn you too,’ I growled, and knocked for the coachman to keep driving.


	7. Chapter 7

_Seigneur Dieu_ , I thought, is _this_ where they have put him?

The house seemed to bulge with damp and dark and rot, even from a distance; the too-small windows peeping out of it all like frightened children too terrified to let in the light. Nor did there seem to be any discernible _plan_ to the place. It reminded me of a corpse that had been left to rot where it had fallen; its limbs twisted in agony; its head thrown back at a grotesque angle at the place where the neck had snapped.

It was called Longwood House.

My eyes briefly took in the sentries patrolling both inside and outside the perimeter, and instinctively scanned the garden and ‘park’ for cover. There wasn’t any. The trees were sparse and almost spitefully bare. The grass and shrubs were dying, like everything else on this godforsaken rock, but the (dead) flowerbeds had a meticulous, geometric symmetry about them, as though André Le Nôtre had started something before giving up in disgust.

 _Seigneur Dieu_ , I thought, is _this_ where they have put him?

It was hotter than the deepest circle of hell. I stood stinking with sweat and fear, with my coat in my hand and my cravat tightening around my neck like a noose.

And I remembered the cold the last time I had seen him. I remembered the hairs on my skin turning to ice, and how I had cursed the snow that persistently got into my boots no matter how lightly I walked, or ran. I remembered the cold, and the city that was burning.

I had come to Moscow in 1812 with the object of assassinating some inordinately-dull degenerate called Prince Kuragin, whom my superiors were convinced was going to pose a serious threat to law and order whether Bonaparte succeeded in conquering Russia or not. Though I _wasn’t_ convinced – my enquiries had revealed no interests other than drinking, deflowering, debauchery and the persistent fucking of his own sister – I committed the unheard-of eccentricity of doing as I was told, and upon arrival found the entire city either burning or burnt to the ground.

In the face of invasion, it was the Russians’ idea of…etiquette: burning the city rather than leaving it to the French.

 _Invading Russia was a stupid idea_ , I thought, as I watched the hollow remains of what must once have been an extraordinary city smoking and collapsing like cigarette paper, _I wonder that his marshals let him do it._

That made me laugh bitterly.

 _He doesn’t listen to his marshals. He divorced Joséphine. His own_ mother _won’t even speak to him anymore, for God’ sake. He has no one left who can say no to him._

I hadn’t seen him, or spoken to him, since the day that he had seized the crown from the Pope’s hands and crowned himself. It was a strange thing; unexpected even to myself, because before that day, I had found the very thought of it amusing: Bonaparte, Emperor of the World.  I had imagined him ushering in a new era in which children would be brought up on two hours of sleep a night, six hours of reading a day and the remaining daylight hours spent aiming canons at things to see how much could be destroyed in the least amount of time. But from the moment that he had placed the crown on his own head…

I determined that night, as I stood freezing in the Moscow snow, that tonight I would see him. Or at least look in at the window to see what he was doing. And, in a way that had become typical of all my dealings with him, I confessed to myself that I did not know why. Perhaps I had learned that asking myself too many questions about him seldom provided answers that would please me.

I saw a soldier die of cold outside the palace walls. He was fifteen or sixteen, and friendless; lying prostrate in the snow; half-buried. He must have been there for hours.

I attempted, in my own weak, cruel, too-soft human way, to rouse him from his reverie. To shake his shoulder, to save him. To feel the pulse in his neck speed up beneath my fingers; my hands.

‘ _Vive l’empereur_ ,’ the boy muttered piteously, in a voice so soft I could hardly hear him, ‘ _l’empereur_ …’

He fell asleep again and he didn’t wake up. I felt nothing beneath my fingers but cold skin. And I remembered Bonaparte once again with the crown upon his head. The music within the cathedral. The cheering in the streets.

I did not want to see him anymore.

I did not change my path.

I scaled the palace wall and façade with little difficulty, and found the window I was looking for with even less. Whatever his faults, the man was always remarkably easy to find. I had always been able to hear him there, even when he was silent.

He stood facing the fire with his back to me; a glass of wine in his hand and his greatcoat wrapped tightly around him. He was staring intently into the flames as though expecting to see the future in them; his legs planted steadily apart; his posture devastating; as though he were on parade.

The glass dropped suddenly to the floor and shattered as with a strangled moan of agony he bent over as suddenly as though he’d been run through, his hands clutching his stomach and pulling at his waistcoat as though he wanted to tear it in two.

By the time I reached him, he was on his knees; his left hand was reaching for his belt as he heard my footsteps or my silence, and as the pistol pressed into my midriff, his eyes met mine: grey flame, grey agony.

He smiled at me disarmingly despite the pain, despite the sweat pouring down his face, and I felt my heart ache unbearably in my chest at how young that smile made him look – how vigorous, how unbeatable – even though his girth was almost double what it had been on the day that we first met.

‘It’s like some damned lancer decided to skewer me for target practice,’ he grinned between gritted teeth as I helped him to the floor and as he replaced his pistol.

‘Stay here,’ I ordered, my hands on his shoulders, ‘I’ll get Larrey –’

‘No,’ he refused.

‘It could be poison, you fool!’

‘ _It isn’t._ ’

And bending almost double, his hands clutching at his abdomen like a child with a tummy ache, he began to silently convulse in pain; the hurt flowing over him like heat waves across a field of sand.

I held him. He let me. His fingers crooked into my back so hard it hurt. He trembled wildly, his shaking like the earth; and he groaned into my chest; my clothing stifling the sound.

‘God,’ he moaned miserably, ‘ _God. God. God._ ’

‘God has nothing to do with it, my friend,’ I quipped; my voice bright and unnatural: nothing like what I felt.

My remark had the desired effect, however, and he snorted with laughter before succumbing once more to whatever it was that was happening to him; and as he trembled uncontrollably against me, I held him harder and harder until my arms ached.

‘It’s alright,’ I remember murmuring at one point; no matter how ridiculous such a statement might seem to a man of forty; ‘it’ll be alright.’

But he made no comment on it, and didn’t move, and by the time the fit subsided, he was lying limply against me and making no effort to hold himself up.

I helped him to sit up, so that we were face to face. I wiped the sweat from his forehead with my sleeve. He smiled at me.

‘You have a prodigious talent for turning up when you are most needed,’ Bonaparte grinned.

‘You’re welcome,’ I remarked.

He gave an ambiguous snort, then continued to stare at me quietly with a kind of desolate, adolescent silence that was not at all consistent with what he said next.

‘Go on then. Get it over with.’

I stared at him.

‘Get what over with?’

‘However it is you’re going to do it.’

It only took me a moment to realise what he meant.

‘You think I’m here to kill you.’

‘Aren’t you?’

I shoved him away from me, stood, and went at once to the window, leaving him where he was on the floor.

‘Have I offended you?’ Bonaparte asked, not seeming remotely put out by my behaviour, ‘forgive me.’

‘Go to the devil, Bonaparte,’ I replied, climbing out onto the windowsill.

‘Good heavens, you’re genuinely offended,’ he remarked, as though I were being entirely unreasonable, ‘come here.’

I turned my back on him and prepared to leap.

‘Dorian. _Come. Here_.’ Bonaparte commanded.

I cursed him.

I cursed myself.

I obeyed.

‘Help me up, would you?’ Bonaparte asked, looking up at me from his place on the parquet floor.

I helped him.

Once I had got him to his feet, and accustomed myself to the feeling of his trying not to lean on me, I helped him into an armchair near the fire.

I seated myself opposite him, and waited for an explanation. I waited for him to quiet my questions.

_Are you alright. Is it serious. Are you ill. Are you dying._

But he was staring enigmatically into the flames again; not much concerned for keeping me waiting; as though it hadn’t been years since we’d seen each other.

I remembered his fingers as they closed around the crown. I remembered my fingers, lingering at the pulse of the dead boy.

‘My father died this way,’ Bonaparte suddenly murmured, ‘My mother never told me how he died. I only know because Paulette had a servant write to me. She was so young she couldn’t even write her own name, and yet, she wrote to me. Seven siblings, and she was the only one that bothered. Some things never change.’

‘Self-pity doesn’t suit you,’ I said.

‘Go away if you can’t bear to hear,’ he retorted.

‘Forgive me,’ I re-joined, ‘the subject of fathers is a difficult one for me. I have an unfortunate and invariable habit of getting mine killed.’

He looked at me for the first time since we had sat down.

‘Self-pity doesn’t suit you either,’ he said.

At that moment there was a discreet knock on the door that was followed directly by Bonaparte’s second valet. Still in his Mameluke regalia despite the weather, he seemed obstinate in the face of the cold’s persuasion.

‘ _Sire_ ,’ the valet said, ‘the urgent matter requiring your attention – Monsieur Dorian,’ he added, bowing as he perceived me by the fire, ‘what a pleasure to see you again.’

‘Hello, Ali,’ I greeted, ‘aren’t you a little cold in those slippers?’

‘The urgent matter can wait until tomorrow, Ali,’ Bonaparte grunted, ignoring me.

‘Only the…’ Ali continued, ignoring me too, ‘the… _urgent matter_ cannot wait any longer.’

‘Tell her to put her clothes on and go home!’ Bonaparte snapped; flashing his valet a look of scathing irritation that did not seem to frighten Ali in the slightest.

‘Sire is put out this evening,’ Ali observed.

‘Yes,’ Bonaparte grumbled, ‘Sire is.’

‘Has Sire drunk his tonic yet?’

‘I don’t want my tonic.’

‘As Sire says. I shall bring it at once.’

Ali bowed and exited the room as Bonaparte set about wringing an imaginary neck.

‘I can’t _believe_ the impertinence of that man,’ Bonaparte complained.

‘So dismiss him,’ I brightly suggested; knowing full well that Bonaparte was too fond of Ali to do anything of the sort.

I relished the grudging growl that I received in response to my suggestion, and fell silent as the storm outside reached its crescendo, tearing viciously at the windows; the palace; the streets; the buildings burning on the streets; the soldiers out on the streets; the soldiers dying on the streets.

_Vive l’empereur…l’empereur._

I looked at Bonaparte. He was lost, once again, in the flames. He looked exhausted. He looked beyond sleep.

‘You can’t stay here,’ I told him.

‘I know,’ he replied.

His honesty troubled me.

‘When do you leave?’ I asked.

‘I’m not leaving,’ he replied.

That troubled me too. The thought of an army staying here, and an army leaving here. The thought of the snow; the cold. The way he didn’t seem to be considering either of them.

_Vive l’empereur…l’empereur._

‘And what about your soldiers?’ I demanded, suddenly and hotly; ‘are they to freeze to death while you make your mind up?’

Bonaparte looked at me haughtily, as a king might look at the lowliest of his vassals.

‘I don’t care for your tone of voice, Dorian,’ he contemptuously declared; his grey eyes flashing suddenly with an ice that I did not recognise, ‘we may be old acquaintances, but you are speaking to your Emperor.’

‘Invading this country is the stupidest idea you’ve ever had, Emperor or not,’ I accused, and his mask fell rapidly away as rapidly as it had appeared; as though it had never been there at all.

‘You don’t agree?’ I pressed.

‘ _You_ sound just like Joséphine,’ Bonaparte snorted.

‘Maybe you should listen to her,’ I suggested.

He snorted again.

‘I hate that woman.’

I snorted back at him.

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Bonaparte. You’d marry her again if you could. You know you would.’

He leaned forward so suddenly that I feared he would collapse again. But he was only putting his head in his hands and mumbling in quiet despair; as though contemplating everything in this world that he hated.

‘I _would_ marry her again,’ Bonaparte muttered, ‘that’s the worst part; the worst thing… I would. I should never have –’

He straightened up just as quickly as he had bent over.

‘I have a son now,’ he declared, as though attempting to reassure himself rather than me, ‘that’s all that matters.’

There was silence as he waited for my reply. When none was forthcoming, he looked at the fire once more and continued to speak without seeing.

‘Where have you been?’ he murmured.

‘Everywhere,’ I replied.

There was a brief silence.

‘And why,’ he quietly continued, ‘have you been everywhere without bothering to reassure me of your continued existence?’

In the old days, I may have laughed lightly.

 _I should have stayed away longer_ , I might have said, _I like being missed._

 _How very selfish of you_ , he might have replied.

But I only had the truth left in me, and I suspected that it was the same for him.

‘I found I couldn’t see you again after the coronation,’ I said quietly, ‘the lie of it; the pretence…it riled me in a way that I had not expected.’

‘The _pretence_ of it?’ he hissed; his face beginning to redden in anger and the crease between his eyes to deepen in confusion; and it was the latter that made the former begin to stir in me.

‘The spectacle,’ I testily explained in the face of Bonaparte’s visibly-growing wrath, ‘the robes. The music. The crown. The _Pope_ , for God’s sake. You hate finery so much you’re practically allergic to it. So what was the point, exactly?’

‘The point, Dorian,’ he replied, as one would to an annoyingly dim-witted child, ‘was to show the sovereigns of Europe that the divine right of kings is as much mine as it is theirs.’

‘But it isn’t,’ I cut in.

‘Now you’re beginning to anger me,’ he seethed.

‘ _Why_ am I beginning to anger you? Because I’m speaking the truth?’

‘Because you are speaking with stupidity, and I cannot _abide_ stupidity.’

I couldn’t believe this was happening. I didn’t want it to be happening. I could feel something between us breaking; snapping; being torn away. I wanted to hold on to it and help it stay whole. Instead, I took out my knife and cut it sharply in two.

‘You were once a son of the Revolution,’ I declared, my fingers curling into fists as he scoffed, visibly, ‘so was I, in my own way. People bled themselves dry fighting for it. This country baptised itself in rivers of blood for it. So many people dead, and dying, and fleeing and fighting: stupidly, uselessly. Lyon happened. Vendée happened. Robespierre. Barras. You. _Vivre libre ou mourir._ And seeing you in Notre Dame with that appalling crown on your head, whatever my own affection for you may be, made me wonder what in hell it was all for: to find ourselves at the end of the Revolution and with only another king to show for it. What was it for? _What was it for_?’

‘What was it for; what was it _for_?’ Napoleon roared, leaping to his feet; his presence seeming to fill the entire room as he shouted down at me, ‘do you know what this country _was_ before I chose to govern it? Do you know what _the crown was_ before I chose to wear it? I did not seize it, nor did I kill for it. I found it _in the gutter_. _I picked it up_. But _the people_ put it on my head. And in showing that to that crowd of intellectual mediocrities who are only kings and queens because their ancestors were kings and queens; in reminding them of their own mortality; I have shown them that my will is greater than nature; that by conquest, that by _will_ , the son of a dead Corsican nationalist may be the same as them.’

‘And you think it worked, do you?’ I spat, not doing him the dignity of rising from my seat, ‘you think the presence of some inestimably dull Hapsburg princess at your side and the flaunting of your sweet golden offspring will be enough to make them forget what you are? _You’re not the same as them_. You never will be. It doesn’t matter how many crowns you put on your head and how many wars you fight. They may call you Emperor to your face, to stop you from invading their countries and murdering their families. But I can guarantee that when they look at you, they see an upstart Corsican nobody who thinks he’s Julius Caesar, and nothing that you do can ever change that!’

‘GET OUT!’ Napoleon bellowed.

‘WITH PLEASURE!’ I bellowed back, ‘should I kiss your hand, or will your shoes suffice?’

The silence that followed cut like a knife. In the space between us, I saw a sudden, infinite blur of violent possibilities take shape. I saw Bonaparte fly at me with a speed surprising in a man of his size. I saw myself glide to my feet to land a single blow to his chest; saw him reeling away from me; saw his foot catch my heel – accidentally or not – to send us both crashing to the floor.

I saw his anger, my anger; my disillusionment, his: what he had expected of me, what I had wanted of him. I saw all of it writhe and scream in the space between us. I didn’t know what had happened, or when it had happened. Perhaps _it_ had been born in the shape of the dead soldier outside; the dead boy. Perhaps it had been born at the coronation, on the day the Republic had died. Perhaps it had even been born on the day we met, when I had thrown myself forwards to get at Rouille; and Bonaparte, silent, had held me back.

Tonight, today, Bonaparte didn’t fly at me, or I at him. We exchanged no blows and no further words. I stood calmly, straightened my coat and walked to the window. When I turned to vault out of it, he was still glaring at me with fury in his eyes, which from this distance seemed cold and black.

I couldn’t resist a parting shot.

‘You can delude yourself that the people put the crown on your head. But you know the truth as well as every other person who hasn’t lived in a cave these twenty years. You found the crown in the gutter. You picked it up. And _you_ put it on your own head. The people had nothing to do with it.’

I waited for a reply. None came. And I left him; the anger growing within me as I made my way through streets of snow in the direction of nowhere.

 _You’re not the same as them_ , I had said, and I had meant it.

I had forgotten to add that I was the last person left to whom he didn’t have to prove it.


	8. Chapter 8

It was the middle of the day, but when I found him, I found him asleep. He lay facing the window rather than the wall; as though longing for something that lay behind the closed wooden shutters; the shutters that he must have closed himself.

I was shocked by how ill he looked. He was as large as he had been the last time I had seen him, but his skin hung limply from his bones like an old tapestry left out to dry, and his face was lined in a way that it had never been before: lined from sorrow rather than from smiling. And I looked around me at this house, and I looked around me at this _place_ , and even though I knew that he had been ill for years, I also knew, in that moment, that the British had done a better job of killing him than any disease ever could.

He opened his eyes. They were grey as nothingness. And I no longer cared that I despised what he had become: what he had made himself the moment he placed a crown on his head. He was my friend, and he was dead; his body lingering; his soul having departed a long time ago.

And yet, he looked at me. He smiled at me, weakly. And I could tell that he knew who I was.

He raised his hand to touch my shoulder. His fingers were light as breath, ghosting softly down the linen of my shirt as softly as they had touched the heat of my skin, once.

His hand reached mine. He tried to squeeze it. He failed. Instead, he wound his fingers slowly through mine, and brought my hand sluggishly upwards to his throat. He rested it there. He tried to squeeze it. He failed.

It was then that I realised what he wanted.

‘ _No_ ,’ I hissed, snatching my hand back, ‘ _no. I won’t do it._ ’

His face became a mirage of pain and despair and anguish as he looked at me; his eyes wild and pleading.

‘ _Please_ ,’ he softly begged; trying to get my hand back again; ‘ _please_.’

‘ _You’re my friend._ ’

‘ _Please._ ’

In his eyes I saw the faces of every innocent I had ever killed; every person who had ever begged for their lives; every person who had ever begged me for anything.

‘Damn you, Bonaparte,’ I hissed; furious at the tears beginning to well up in my eyes at how completely I understood; how bloody completely I understood him; ‘you cannot ask this of me.’

‘My…friend, please,’ Bonaparte murmured; his voice like an old man’s; his eyes beginning to cloud with a misery that I had never seen in him before as they fixed fervently on mine; ‘remember…please…’

He squeezed his eyes shut and smiled with the tranquility of a person coming home after twenty years, and as I watched his smile grow, and his hand reach out for something that only he could see, I realised that he was looking into the past. His. Mine. Ours.

‘The Tuileries…’ he murmured, ‘remember?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered. My voice cracked.

‘I told you… my name,’ he breathed, his eyes still closed, ‘my new name…my French name…’

‘Yes.’

‘First person…I told. The first.’

I remembered the day that we had met; all his glory ahead of him. I remembered today; all his glory behind; behind and forgotten and breaking; him breaking. I felt the heat of Longwood House around me. I saw the dark pass across his face. I saw his closed eyes and the vision behind them; a temporary respite from this, from hell. And I realised that I had come for this. I had come to set him free.

When he felt my hands at his neck, he smiled, with the contentment of one at the edge of a dream.

And as I kissed his brow, I heard him whisper.

‘Thank you.’


End file.
